The Favourite Certainly Wasn’t Mine

There are films you dislike because they are badly made. There are films you dislike because they are offensive, incoherent or completely devoid of artistic merit. Then there are films like The Favourite: films whose talent you can see, whose performances you can appreciate and whose critical acclaim you can understand intellectually—while still spending almost two hours wondering when you are finally going to be allowed to go home.

When The Favourite was released in 2018, critics adored it. It received ten Academy Award nominations, with Olivia Colman winning Best Actress for her performance as Queen Anne. It was praised for its sharp writing, unconventional cinematography, lavish costumes and gleefully vicious portrayal of power, sex and rivalry within the royal court.

I watched it expecting a clever, darkly funny historical drama.

Instead, I was bored straight through and left enormously underwhelmed.

This was not because I “didn’t get it.” That is often the defence deployed when someone fails to worship a critically acclaimed film: perhaps it was too subtle, too strange or too intellectually ambitious for the poor unimpressed viewer. But I understood what The Favourite was doing. I understood the power games, the shifting loyalties and the deliberate ugliness beneath the extravagant costumes. I understood that the wide-angle lenses were designed to make the palace look warped and claustrophobic. I understood that none of the central characters was meant to be conventionally likeable.

Understanding a film’s choices, however, does not automatically make those choices enjoyable.

The film centres on Queen Anne, a physically and emotionally fragile monarch whose court is dominated by her long-standing companion, Sarah Churchill. Their relationship is intimate, volatile and deeply entwined with political power. Into this arrangement comes Sarah’s impoverished cousin, Abigail, who begins as a servant and gradually manoeuvres her way into the Queen’s favour—and her bed.

On paper, this should be irresistible. Two intelligent, ruthless women battling for influence over an emotionally vulnerable queen within a court full of preening men? It sounds delicious. It should crackle with danger. It should feel like watching an exquisitely dressed knife fight.

Instead, much of the film feels like watching people wander through beautifully decorated rooms while being unpleasant to one another at a pace that suggests the knives have been ordered but are currently delayed in transit.

There are moments of brilliance. Olivia Colman is extraordinary, moving between petulance, grief, cruelty, loneliness and desperate need with frightening ease. Her Queen Anne is sometimes ridiculous, sometimes monstrous and sometimes painfully human. Rachel Weisz gives Sarah an icy confidence that makes even her most brutal remarks compelling, while Emma Stone makes Abigail’s transformation from apparent innocent to calculating opportunist entirely believable.

The problem is not the acting. If anything, the performances are doing an enormous amount of work to keep the film alive.

The problem is that The Favourite seems so impressed by its own eccentricity that it repeatedly mistakes strangeness for substance. Men throw fruit at a naked courtier. There is duck racing. Aristocrats perform an aggressively anachronistic dance. Characters fire guns, trade elaborate insults and stalk through corridors filmed with fisheye lenses that make the palace look like an expensive funhouse.

These scenes are certainly memorable. They are also the cinematic equivalent of someone repeatedly nudging you and asking, “Isn’t this delightfully weird?”

After a while, the answer is simply: yes. It is weird. What else have you got?

The humour was another major disappointment. The Favourite is regularly described as a dark comedy, but I found much of its comedy less sharply observed than deliberately awkward. The dialogue is packed with insults and obscenities that are clearly intended to puncture the dignity of the period setting. Occasionally, this works beautifully. More often, it feels like the film is relying on the contrast between grand costumes and crude language to do the joke’s heavy lifting.

A duchess saying something vulgar while wearing an elaborate wig is amusing once. By the tenth variation, the surprise has rather worn off.

Perhaps the most frustrating part is that there is genuine emotional weight buried beneath the film’s performance of cleverness. Queen Anne keeps seventeen rabbits, one for each child she lost. This is a devastating detail. Suddenly, her neediness, volatility and terror of abandonment have a history that reaches far beyond courtly indulgence. Her body is failing her. Her children are gone. The people closest to her are competing for access to her affection and authority, and she cannot always distinguish love from manipulation.

That is a powerful tragedy.

Yet the film often seems reluctant to remain emotionally sincere for more than a moment. Whenever it approaches tenderness or genuine devastation, it quickly retreats behind cruelty, absurdity or stylistic spectacle. It is as if the film is embarrassed by the possibility of taking its own characters seriously.

The result is emotional distance. I could admire Colman’s portrayal of grief without feeling fully drawn into Anne’s world. I could understand Sarah’s attachment to the Queen without mourning the collapse of their relationship. I could follow Abigail’s ascent without feeling particularly shocked by what she was willing to do to achieve it.

Everyone is fascinating in theory, but exhausting in practice.

Defenders of the film might argue that this discomfort is the point. The palace is meant to feel grotesque. Power is meant to corrupt intimacy. The strange lenses and distorted compositions reflect a world in which everyone is watching, scheming and performing. The audience is not meant to relax into the familiar pleasures of a conventional costume drama.

Fair enough—but intentionally uncomfortable is not the same as automatically compelling.

A film may deliberately create boredom, alienation or frustration, but the intention does not erase the experience. If I spend the runtime disengaged, the knowledge that my disengagement may have been artistically engineered is not much comfort. I can recognise the craftsmanship involved in building a beautifully designed chair while still pointing out that it is unbearable to sit on.

That is my central problem with The Favourite. It is exceptionally well-made, exquisitely acted and almost entirely unenjoyable.

Its reputation seems to rest partly on the idea that because it disrupts the traditional period drama, it must be more intelligent than one. It refuses stately romance and historical reverence in favour of bodily decay, sexual politics, absurdity and female ambition. Those are worthwhile choices—but unconventional does not necessarily mean profound. Sometimes a duck race is just a duck race.

By the time the film reached its final sequence, with Abigail rubbing the Queen’s legs while images of Anne’s rabbits multiply across the screen, I understood the intended horror. Abigail believes she has won, only to discover that proximity to power is not the same as possessing it. Anne remains trapped by grief and illness; Abigail is trapped in servitude; their relationship is reduced to control, resentment and mutual dependence.

It is bleak, clever and visually striking.

It also left me thinking, “Is that it?”

Perhaps my expectations were part of the problem. I had heard The Favourite described as wickedly funny, thrillingly vicious and astonishingly original. I expected a savage battle of wits. What I experienced was a slow, cold film in which three magnificent actresses fought desperately against a story that kept me at arm’s length.

I do not think The Favourite is a bad film. That would almost be easier. Bad films can be dismissed. The Favourite is something far more irritating: a film full of elements I ought to have loved, assembled in a way that left me feeling almost nothing.

Olivia Colman deserved her Oscar. The costumes deserved their praise. The cinematography is undeniably distinctive, although it occasionally made me feel as though I were observing the royal court through a doorbell camera.

But a collection of excellent ingredients does not guarantee a satisfying meal. The Favourite is beautifully plated, daringly seasoned and served with enormous confidence.

I simply found it remarkably difficult to swallow.

The critics may have crowned it.

It was certainly not my favourite.